“We can’t be sure whether the sacrifices were human or animal, naturally, although the . . . um . . . the shape certainly suggests they may have been human. The right dimensions, you know. Very rare artifact. It implies that this hill was a site of immense religious importance in the Bronze Age, yes?

Such a terrible shame . . . this road.”

“Have you found anything else to suggest this?” I asked. If he had, it would be months before we could disentangle our case from the mediaversus-New-Age frenzy. Hunt gave me a wounded look. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.

He was the last interview. As we were putting our stuff away, the boy tech knocked on the door of the Portakabin and stuck his head in. “Um,”

he said. “Hi. Sophie says to tell you we’re finishing up for today and there’s one more thing you might want to see.”

They’d packed up the markers and left the altar stone alone in its field again, and at first the whole site looked deserted; the reporters had long since moved on, and all the archaeologists had gone home except Hunt, who was clambering into a muddy red Ford Fiesta. Then we came out from among the Portakabins, and I saw a flash of white between the trees. The familiar, uneventful routine of the interviews had settled my mood considerably (Cassie calls these preliminary background interviews the nuthin’ stage of a case: nobody saw nuthin’, nobody heard nuthin’, nobody In the Woods 57

did nuthin’), but still I felt something zip down my spine as we stepped into the wood. Not fear: more like the sudden shot of alertness when someone wakes you by calling your name, or when a bat shrills past just too high to be heard. The undergrowth was thick and soft, years of fallen leaves sinking under my feet, and the trees grew heavily enough to filter the light into a restless green glow.

Sophie and Helen were waiting for us in a tiny clearing, maybe a hundred yards in. “I left it for you to take a look at,” Sophie said, “but I want to bag all this shit before the light starts going. I’m not setting up the lighting rig.”

Someone had been using the place as a campsite. A sleeping-bag-sized patch had been cleared of sharp branches, and the layers of leaves were pressed flat; a few yards away were the remains of a campfire, in a wide circle of bare earth. Cassie whistled.

“Is this our kill site?” I asked, without much hope: for that, Sophie would have interrupted the interviews.

“Not a chance,” she said. “We’ve done a fingertip search: no signs of a struggle and not a drop of blood—there’s a big spill of something near the fire, but it tests negative, and from the smell I’m pretty sure it’s red wine.”

“That’s one up-market camper,” I said, raising my eyebrows. I had been picturing some bucolic homeless guy, but market forces mean that “wino,”